This {photograph} taken on October 2, 2023 reveals central Dushanbe throughout a sand storm. The air was dry and heat and the skies over Dushanbe have been gray with out a trace of solar throughout one other current poisonous sand storm that had enveloped the capital of Tajikistan. AFP
The air was dry and heat and the skies over Dushanbe have been gray with out a trace of solar throughout one other current poisonous sand storm that enveloped the capital of Tajikistan.
Storms like this, which consultants say are being attributable to local weather change, have gotten more and more frequent throughout Central Asia, harming its inhabitants.
The imposing mountains round Dushanbe have been barely seen by way of the haze and hulks of condominium blocks below development stood like ghostly apparitions.
Tajikistan was ranked one of many high 10 most polluted international locations on the earth within the 2022 IQAir air high quality index.
“I can’t stop coughing. I’m fed up with this dust choking me,” Munira Khushkadamova, a instructor, stated throughout a go to to the Sofia clinic in Dushanbe.
For the final two years, the 43-year-old has been affected by respiratory failure — a prognosis given to her from her physician Faical Sakhray.
“In the last few years I have been getting more and more patients with cardiovascular diseases,” he instructed AFP, blaming effective particles from the storms.
“The biggest ones enter the organism and stay in the upper respiratory tract but the finer ones go into the lower respiratory tract, then the lungs, the heart and other organs,” he stated.
Excessive publicity
The United Nations estimates that 80 p.c of the Tajik inhabitants is uncovered to the very best concentrations of effective particles, often called PM2.5.
Sakhray stated individuals ought to drink loads of water and put on a masks for defense.
However the variety of individuals carrying a masks within the streets of Dushanbe is minimal.
Regardless of having “difficulty breathing and headaches”, Nigora Yusupova stated she wouldn’t put on a masks as a result of it “makes breathing harder”.
A majority of these storms was uncommon however they now begin in spring and proceed into the autumn in giant components of Central Asia.
“In the 1990s, there were two or three sand and dust storms per year in Tajikistan. Now there can be up to 35,” stated Zebuniso Muminzoda, head of the Tajik department of the Regional Environmental Centre for Central Asia.
“Because of climate change, longer dry seasons lead to sand and dust storms by drying out the ground and stronger winds then pick up this dry soil,” she stated.
The storms typically begin out within the dried-out stretches of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan but additionally within the Kazakh steppes and in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Muminzoda pointed to a “human factor”, saying forestry, unhealthy irrigation and year-round livestock farming have been all contributing to “degrading the soil”.
It’s a vicious circle for a poor, primarily rural nation like Tajikistan, the place the poisonous storms even have a adverse impact on farming and soil fertility.
The sand and mud additionally falls on the area’s many glaciers — a vital supply of water within the area and “speeds up their melting,” Muminzoda stated.
Whereas there are sometimes tensions between Central Asian international locations, they’re trying frequent efforts to sort out environmental questions like water administration and nuclear waste disposal.
However the storm risk in Tajikistan remains to be under-estimated “as natural catastrophe”, in response to the Regional Environmental Centre, which operates in all 5 international locations within the area.